Review: Delusi – Cataclysmia

Just as apocalyptic warnings are being etched into the sky by meteor trails and patterns of alien light, my skull is being ravaged by all manner of scuttling bugs and electric shocks. Cataclysmia is a impending worldwide disaster and a catastrophe happening to me personally, and the sense of depth is such that I have to adapt to operating in two modes of focus simultaneously: one being a squint at the concoction of choir and volcanic ash swirling over the horizon line, and the other practically aimed inward at my own head, where wooden splinters wedge themselves in my ears and walkie-talkie signals are being rewired directly into my brain. Movement is sudden and forceful: bass plosives slamming into doors, landscape transitions initiated by plummeting trapdoors.

It’s a claustrophobia of large spaces – perhaps a juxtaposition between the yawning panorama of outer space and the psychological unease that manifests in thick, sensory haunts. On “Vestiges Of Life”, I alternate between the dank terror of a scorpion’s nest and an underwater submergence in analogue signal; sucked between the tap and scrape of exoskeleton and an aqueous cavern of bitcrushed voices and jets and electricity, hauled between one and the other as if being forcefully drowned over and over again. There’s a sense of urgent forewarning about the record, like a presentation of a bleak future that we must strive to avoid. Will we all be underwater soon? Swimming through waves of artificial light and pixelated image, with the elegance and softness of nature choked out by the hard-edged imposition of man-made substance and binary communication?